Kudos: Summer Edition 2025

A summer full of milestones, contributions, and achievements worth celebrating
by Fabiola M. Martinez Del Valle

Join us as we highlight the accomplishments and contributions from our English community over the summer. This special edition brings together everything that happened during the break from major milestones to everyday moments worth celebrating. Let’s take a look at how our community lit up our summer. 

Awards & Achievements

• We’re thrilled to announce three faculty promotions:
  • Sarah Ensor (Literary Studies) → Associate Professor with tenure
  • Mark Vareschi (Literary Studies) → Professor
  • Heather Swan (Literary Studies) → Teaching Faculty III
• Caroline Gottschalk (Composition and Rhetoric Professor), Gareth Baldrica-Franklin (PhD Candidate in Geography), and their collaborators from Encompass Socio-ecological Consulting, Grand Rapids Public Museum, Fringe Digital, and WiLS received a $100,000 ACLS Digital Justice Development Grant for their project Supporting Ottawa Data Sovereignty and Cultural Restoration. The team will build interactive mapping tools and on-the-ground programming to support the Maple River Restoration in Michigan, using digital platforms like Mukurtu to protect culturally sensitive materials and re-story Indigenous erasure.
• Kirk Sides (Literary Studies Professor) and Nicole Ramer (PhD Candidate in Composition & Rhetoric) have been named Morgridge Fellows as part of UW–Madison’s largest cohort to date. The year-long program supports community-engaged scholarship through research and teaching done in equitable collaboration with local communities. Both join a diverse group of educators committed to deepening community engagement across campus.
• Madelyn Watson, an undergraduate researcher from Literary Studies, received a Sophomore Research Fellowship to work with Professor Joshua Calhoun on the project Old Books, New Stories. Funded by campus grants, the fellowship supports original student research. Madelyn will explore on– and off-campus archival materials  and share her experience on Holding History’s Bookish Blog, bridging historical texts with contemporary storytelling.
• Meier (English 100 instructor) was honored with the 2025 SASOGD/SAFP Gender Liberation Award from the American Psychological Association. The award recognizes Meier’s advocacy and inclusive teaching practices that center gender diversity and liberation.
• Maryhilda Obasiota Ibe (MFA alum in Poetry, current Hoffman-Halls Emerging Artist Fellow) was named a 2025 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellow, one of the largest awards for young poets in the U.S. The fellowship, sponsored by the Poetry Foundation, includes publication opportunities and a cohort reading at the O, Miami Poetry Festival. Andrew Chi Keong Yim (MFA candidate in Poetry) was named a finalist; an impressive double honor for our Creative Writing program.
• Shah Tazrian Ashrafi (MFA candidate in Fiction) was named a finalist for the 2025 Raz-Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize for his manuscript Trespassing: Stories. Sponsored by Prairie Schooner, the University of Nebraska–Lincoln’s national literary quarterly, the prize is awarded annually to one poetry collection and one story collection.
• John Mulvihill earned second prize in the 31st annual Wisconsin People & Ideas Fiction Contest. Sponsored by Wisconsin People & Ideas magazine, the contest is the state’s premiere literary competition for fiction and poetry, open to all Wisconsin residents and students. Winners receive cash prizes, publication in the magazine, and a featured reading at the Wisconsin Book Festival in Madison. The contest and his winning story were highlighted in the Monroe Times.

Publications

• Joshua Calhoun (Literary Studies Professor, Co-Director of Holding History) and Sarah Marty (School of Business Professor, Co-Director of Holding History) published “How to Design Public Events” in the Cambridge journal Public Humanities. The essay outlines a decade of collaboration between humanities and arts administration, offering a practical framework for inclusive event design and graduate training in public humanities.
• Vinay Dharwadker (Literary Studies Professor) contributed an essay to The Oxford Handbook of Modern Indian Literatures, which won the 2024 René Wellek Prize for best edited collection from the American Comparative Literature Association. The prize honors work that crosses linguistic, national, and disciplinary boundaries.
• Shah Tazrian Ashrafi (MFA candidate in Fiction) published “Camp” in Shenandoah Literary, a biannual online magazine based at Washington and Lee University. Inspired by Diane Cook’s dystopian fiction, Ashrafi’s story reimagines institutional grief in a Bangladeshi setting through a parent-child relationship.
• Rickey Fayne (2023-25 Mendota Postdoctoral Fellow in creative writing at UW-Madison) released his debut novel The Devil Three Times in May. The book was longlisted for the First Novel Prize from the Center for Fiction, which celebrates emerging voices in fiction. Winners receive $15,000, with shortlisted authors honored at the annual First Novel Fête.
• The first story from the 2025 cohort of the Greater Madison Writing Project’s Youth Press Corps has been published in The Capital Times. This marks the beginning of a series of youth-written stories that will appear over the coming weeks, amplifying the voices and perspectives of young writers across the region.
• Caroline Gottschalk (Composition and Rhetoric Professor) worked with Dr. Kasey Keeler (Civil Society and Community Studies, American Indian and Indigenous Studies), Dr. Ruth Goldstein (Gender and Women’s Studies), Dr. Joe Mason (Geography), Dr. Ryan Hellenbrand (Nelson Institute ’25), Hilary Habeck Hunt (Geography), and Dr. Liz Anna Kozik (Nelson Institute ’24) to develop educational modules on Indigenous Land Dispossession in Wisconsin. Supported by Humanities Initiatives in Colleges and Universities funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the materials explore the history and consequences of the Morrill Act of 1862, which established land grant universities like UW–Madison and facilitated the transfer of Tribal lands to settler control. These interdisciplinary materials, designed to be shared widely and integrated into existing courses, are available for use and sharing on the Center for Campus History website.
• Aparna Dharwadker’s (Literary Studies Professor) new book Cosmo-Modernism and Theater in India: Writing and Staging Multilingual Modernisms was published by Columbia University Press. The book introduces a new framework for understanding non-Anglophone Indian modernisms through multilingual theatrical traditions.

Publicity

• The Division of the Arts at UW–Madison featured Erika Meitner (Creative Writing Professor) in “The Exquisite Poetry of Place,” spotlighting her work and celebrating her 2025 Creative Arts Award. The profile explores Meitner’s poetic engagement with geography, memory, and belonging.
• Caroline Gottschalk (Composition and Rhetoric Professor), Hank Covey (PhD candidate in Composition and Rhetoric), and students from ENGL 236, 245, and 703 were featured by UW News in After the flood: UW students apply classroom learning to support a Wisconsin community in healing, highlighting their community-based storytelling work in the Kickapoo River and Coon Creek Watersheds in southwestern Wisconsin following catastrophic flooding.